Category Archives: Colombus Blue Jackets

Although the Blue Jackets aren’t putting Johnson, 29, on the block, they’ll listen to any offers that could potentially help them in the future. He and Tyutin each will make more than $4 million next season. Campbell, 32, can be had for a lot less and is serviceable on faceoffs and the penalty kill. The remaining forwards are probably safe for now, including Rychel, who in his second season has been the center of speculation about his desire to leave. However, he’s earned a regular spot and has impressed Tortorella with his play, not an easy feat. In a perfect world, the Blue Jackets would somehow find a suitor to take the hefty contract ($5.25 million per season through 2019-2020) of oft-injured forward David Clarkson, but that’s unlikely to happen.

Ultimately, you want to have the best chance at winning the lottery — and getting Matthews, who is most often compared with Jonathan Toews and Anze Kopitar, and never to Gilbert “I’ve got my Sidney Crosby” Brule.

If you are the Jackets, what you want to do is lose, artfully and otherwise. You want to dump veterans at the trade deadline, bring up a bunch of Lake Erie Monsters and see what the kids can do. You want to make February, March and April into three more Octobers.

Alas, the penchant of these Jackets is to catch fire around Groundhog Day, and, well, we’ve all seen that movie, many times, and we’ve yet to see the end of it.

The Canucks placed Chris Higgins on waivers last Tuesday. A day later, the former Yale forward cleared, with nobody interested in assuming the $2.5 million he’s due annually through 2017. Higgins is only 32 years old. The left wing scored 12 goals and 24 assists in 77 games for Vancouver last season. But Higgins is the odd man out as general manager Jim Benning tries to make his aging roster younger.